Markok765 said:
Why use filters? When i get my color neg films dont i ask them not to use cc filters. i say this because kodak gold 200 has turned out blue when they do this. IMHO, its better without filters.
If you use no filters (just a bare light source), chances are you'll get absolutely hideous colors; color film and paper are designed so that filtration is necessary to get good color, at least as a general rule. If you're using a photofinisher and ask for "no filters," they almost certainly
are using filters (or are printing digitally), but they might switch off some of their computerized corrections that try to match the color on a frame-by-frame basis and that will get confused by scenes with unusual colors (say, a full-body shot of a single person against a bright orange wall).
celtic_man81 said:
my filter only goes up to 17 for each
Then your enlarger is calibrated in something other than Kodak's units -- or maybe the filtration scale is marked in 10x units (as in, a reading of "5" on your scale should be read as "50"). In any event, the suggested starting points that are sometimes delivered with paper or that you'll find in manuals, books, Web sites, and so on are just that -- starting points. You'll need to adjust your print to get good color.
One helpful procedure is to create a test print with the help of a test printing easel. These easels enable you to print anywhere from four to twelve or more images on one sheet of paper. Begin by composing and focusing your photo using the easel on which you want to print. Then swap in your test-print easel, re-focus, but do not adjust the head height. Find a part of the print with a good selection of colors, ideally including something fairly neutral. Begin making test exposures in each of the frames of the test-print easel, but vary the filtration settings and/or exposure you use in a systematic way. When you process the print, you'll have the same section of your main print repeated again and again, but with different color casts. Ideally, one of them will be dead on, but chances are you'll just have one that's better than the others, and you'll be able to see how to adjust it from there. If your initial guess for time or filtration is way off, you might need to repeat this process.
Personally, I use a test-print easel that enables me to put eight exposures on one 8x10-inch sheet of paper. I use two of these frames for exposure tests (subdividing each one, so I can test four exposure times). For the remaining six frames, I vary the cyan, magenta, and yellow filtration up and down by 10 or 15 points. Obviously, careful record-keeping during a print session is critical if this procedure is to do any good. Be sure to write down your planned sequence of filtration/exposure settings, or the starting point and how you plan to vary filtration and exposure.
